We first called out Commerce Place, on their inability to fix one little door, in August.
Hey, traditional media, anytime you like one of our stories we can save you guys some time working on it if you just drop us a line. We’ll do it for standard freelance rates, nothing fancy.
Then, you know, you could work on investigative news that people (like us) with day jobs can’t do.
But it is super-flattering.
SEE jumped onto our bandwagon nearly 3 months later.
How about a story on the WCB corruption and criminal practices?
The amount of paperwork to slog through, and red tape to cut through, to do anything worthwhile on a large organization such as the WCB is just the kind of thing that takes time. Time that actual newsrooms should make.
I am curious about this “real”/”traditional” media thing. Aren’t the weeklies a different beast? They sure hope they are.
Also: you pay?
I’d say the alt-weeklies ARE different from the mainstream media, but I lump them together as “traditional” to mean before Internet.
We pay in love and admiration only.
You guys need to have a separate section where you can keep tabs MSM stealing your good ideas.
What is this? The third or fourth time it’s happened?
I doubt anyone’s stealing. Probably just the same things on our minds is all.
I second Paul’s suggestion…it seems to be happening more (Vue covered Backstairs on Oct 22) and there should be a tally.
Good for you on calling them out though! :)
Or maybe they’ve all been reading this: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/22/arts/22IDEA.html
(the content is a stretch, but the title works – if we consider the edmonton outside the workgroup of MSM)
ZOMG U SHUD STASRT STEALING STRIES FROM THEM!!!!! THAT WILL SURELY TEACH TEHM A LESSON!!!!!!!!!
Paul, should we also tally when they steal our terrible ideas? That would be even funnier.
I’m all for the idea that sometimes people do the same story. That is the case with the Backstairs Vegan Cafe, since VUE had the story at the same time as us, but was hampered by a Thursday publication date.
In this case, however, SEE’s offices are one block from Commerce Place, we’ve been banging this drum for some time (because we don’t want to do real work) and unless their story was different (like maybe, they called, that scared people into fixing it and it was fixed by publication time) it’s all a little too similar. Plus, it totally made me do a double-take when I saw it.
It could also fall under the traditional/mainstream news idea that you have to have the same story as everybody else, because you won’t admit your audience knows there are other sources out there, and until they read it from you it’s not news. THAT’S the thing blogs and aggregate websites are killing, in my opinion.
tricotmiss, that’s a really interesting idea from the NY Times story. I think you could apply that to a lot of things. People come up with stuff all the time, it doesn’t work, somebody knows a little about that original idea and takes it to new heights. It’s subconscious (or not always) stealing. :)
Good point Jeff…I do it all the time with my knitting patterns and it’s a huge source of debate in the knitting world (insert knitting joke here, then get over it please).
It’s even more common that the original idea DOES work for whomever came up with it, but the idea/pattern/story can be tweaked to suit the needs of each new person. Then the issue becomes how much tweaking is needed to diverge enough from the original to become a unique idea/pattern/story…it’s the tweaking thats been missing in a lot of these “stolen” stories.
(I thought that might have been the case with the Backstairs story).
Re: Backstairs story, I meant that I thought it might have been written concurrently as Jeff said.